Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation
Subtitle: Captain Cook, William Hodges and the Return to the Pacific
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: February 29, 2008
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 270
ISBN-13: 9780521881944
Subjects: European history: c 1750 to c 1900; Social history; c 1700 to c 1800; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Europe; Australian & Oceanian; General; Renaissance; Language Arts & Disciplines / General
Description: "The artist William Hodges accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage to the South Pacific in 1772-5. His extraordinarily vivid images, read against the journals of Cook and his companions, reveal as much about European cultures and historiography as about the peoples they visited. In this book, Harriet Guest discusses Hodges's dramatic landscapes and portraits alongside written accounts of the voyages and in the context of the theories of civilisation which shaped European perceptions - theories drawn from the works of philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment such as Adam Smith and John Millar.

She argues that the voyagers resorted to diverse or incompatible models of progress in successive encounters with different groups of islanders, and shows how these models also structured metropolitan views of the voyagers and of Hodges's work. This fully illustrated study offers a fresh perspective on eighteenth-century representations of gender, colonialism and exploration."--Jacket.